Haettu kohde: Pantheon

Les Invalides, the Pantheon, and Versailles, in these three places one feels most painfully, how immensely much is lost with time. In Panthéon’s crypt near the wall lies Gambetta’s heart in a large red granite bowl, and in their vaults next to each other, on the both sides of the corridor, sleep Voltaire and Rousseau, joined together by death and glory. In the same chamber, Victor Hugo and Zola.

Physicist Léon Foucault made an experiment in Panthéon 31 March 1851, to prove that Copernicus and Galileo were right: the Earth is not the centre of the world, it revolves around the Sun and it also rotates about its own axis. A steel wire measured 67 meters was hung from the ceiling of Panthéon from which a very dense bob—having a diameter of 38 centimetres and weighing 28 kilograms—was hanging. On that very day the pendulum was set swinging and it returned approximately 2.5 millimetres to the left of its starting point. The plane of the pendulum’s swing rotated clockwise 11° per hour, making a full circle in 32.7 hours.